When Skylar was small, her main goals in life were to win American Idol and attend Harvard University — hey, 50 percent’s not bad! Originally from northern New Jersey and raised by Ghanaian and Nigerian parents, Skylar’s love of learning led her to Phillips Academy Andover for high school and, later, to Harvard where she pursued a joint degree in English, History, and Literature with a focus in Ethnic Studies. She graduated with a 3.9 GPA and wrote a creative thesis — a half-hour magical realism animated pilot entitled Blackgirljuju — that won the Lee Patrick Award for Drama, awarded annually to the student who shows the most promise in the dramatic arts. Never one to disappoint, Skylar followed her screenwriting aims to Los Angeles and has since written for shows on Netflix and HBO Max with the likes of JJ Abrams and Spike Jonze.

Skylar has been teaching since her senior year of high school, when she was one of 16 seniors chosen to teach a mandatory course for sophomores called Personal and Community Education. Her experiences developing curricula and working with students led her to become a Pedagogy Fellow at Harvard’s Derek Bok Center for Teaching and Learning. There she developed and delivered presentations to graduate student teaching fellows designed to teach them how to better facilitate the learning of their undergraduate students. Through college and beyond, she has worked as a subject tutor in all things English, literature, history, gender studies, and ethnic studies. She has also worked as an admissions counselor, helping students devise admissions lists, craft personal narratives, and develop compelling personal statements.

Outside of the academy, Skylar is an avid consumer of sci-fi and fantasy books and visual media, a fashion lover, a training birthworker, a musical theatre nerd, and a practitioner of yoga and meditation.